Idle Weekend January 8, 2016: Keyframing the Issues

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I wasn't saying I or anyone else should feel bad about liking something. I was trying to say that it's generally good to be aware of why you like a certain thing and to try and not let yourself go overboard with it. I love the Coen Brothers and I don't feel bad about that, but I also don't want to blindly let myself be charmed by everything they do just because it satisfactorily hits the Coen Brothers pleasure center of my brain.

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I think the idea of guilty pleasures is completely unrelated to what Rob and Danielle were talking about. A guilty pleasure is something you enjoy even though on an intellectual level you think it is terrible. The prisoner of your own taste thing is the realization that the thing you thought you enjoyed on an intellectual level turned out to be some sort of Pavlovian response, and it is frustrating because suddenly your own identity suddenly feels a little too obvious.

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I think it's always useful to consider why one likes the things one likes, it's just the anxiety about liking the 'wrong' thing or liking something for the 'wrong' reasons that frustrates me. I think that approach often bothers me for the same reason the Hotline Miami thing mentioned above does: People take a piece that's engaging and inventive, apply standards that don't fit it, and then find it wanting by those standards and dismiss it. It too often becomes a practice of breaking art down into elements and calling those elements good or bad rather than looking at the purpose they serve within the overall intent of the work or what the meaningful impact of the work is on the audience.

I'm not trying to call anyone out on this, I may just be being oversensitive, but when I hear worries like Rob's concern that Limitless might or might not be a 'good' show or Danielle's concern that despite finding Fargo S2 compelling there wasn't anything underneath I hear a performative desire to like the right things for the right reasons. That's fine, everyone's subject to those pressures, it just bothers me when used as a metric for media in a way that occludes the unique qualities of the work itself.

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I'm not trying to call anyone out on this, I may just be being oversensitive, but when I hear worries like Rob's concern that Limitless might or might not be a 'good' show or Danielle's concern that despite finding Fargo S2 compelling there wasn't anything underneath I hear a performative desire to like the right things for the right reasons. That's fine, everyone's subject to those pressures, it just bothers me when used as a metric for media in a way that occludes the unique qualities of the work itself.

I agree, and I also think that the intellectual disquiet brought on by those concerns predisposes a certain type of personality to make unnecessary criticism of a work, in order to reconcile said concerns. Danielle didn't mean it, but it was very weird to hear her criticize Mike Milligan from Fargo for being too full of "jive" when the character was written for a white actor (even outside of Bokeem Woodbine's interviews, there are hints of this when Milligan occasionally refers to how America "used to be great" in the past) and cast against type (something that apparently happened with the other characters in the second season, just more subtly, which I'm afraid I missed because I'm not familiar with the career arcs of Ted Danson and Jean Smart). I do it, too, because I'm skeptical of anything that I like too much, but trying to intellectualize every gut reaction you have to a piece of media, especially intellectualizing it against itself because you can't entirely explain it otherwise, is an impulse that's begging to be second-guessed.

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I think it's always useful to consider why one likes the things one likes, it's just the anxiety about liking the 'wrong' thing or liking something for the 'wrong' reasons that frustrates me. I think that approach often bothers me for the same reason the Hotline Miami thing mentioned above does: People take a piece that's engaging and inventive, apply standards that don't fit it, and then find it wanting by those standards and dismiss it. It too often becomes a practice of breaking art down into elements and calling those elements good or bad rather than looking at the purpose they serve within the overall intent of the work or what the meaningful impact of the work is on the audience.

I'm not trying to call anyone out on this, I may just be being oversensitive, but when I hear worries like Rob's concern that Limitless might or might not be a 'good' show or Danielle's concern that despite finding Fargo S2 compelling there wasn't anything underneath I hear a performative desire to like the right things for the right reasons. That's fine, everyone's subject to those pressures, it just bothers me when used as a metric for media in a way that occludes the unique qualities of the work itself.

I think that's calling for a very narrow band of criticism to exist. A holistic look at the overall intent of the work that examines its unique qualities is an important style of criticism, to be sure. However breaking a piece down into individual elements and evaluating them also has its place. Often, that style of criticism is treating the work as a lens to examine a larger issue beyond the work itself. And that's perfectly valid even if it necessarily reduces the specificity of the work because it means the work has caused the critic to engage with wider cultural issues and practices. That is the methodology that Anita Sarkeesian has used in her videos, and the objections to her criticism often employ a similar rhetorical strategy to what you are proposing: she's taking these elements out of context and ignoring how they fit into the work as a whole, she's ignoring the unique qualities of the work, what's good about the work, that she is using the wrong standards to evaluate things, etc. People have lots of dispositions and personalities, and that will affect their reactions and criticisms to things, and even if sometimes that says more about the person than the work that's okay because people can be pretty interesting too!

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I'm not saying that this sort of criticism shouldn't exist, I'm just saying that a lot of people approach it as though if you can level a criticism about a work it devalues the work in some fundamental way, makes it less art, and I find that frustrating. This is actually kind of related to the heros/idols discussion that happened on the January 15th episode: Appreciate what a work/person brings to the table, understand where it/they falls short. I think being able to do both of those at the same time is a super important skill, rather than trying to just slot them into 'good' or 'bad'.